The last five years have seen a significant increase in the involvement of the private sector in the core areas of education delivery and not just in the provision of educational support services. This growing involvement of the private sector in education has been commented on in the press and in debates on education, but it is often misinterpreted as privatisation (selling or turning over publicly held assets to private owners) and as a new phenomenon. It is neither. The decision to provide some activities within the organisation and to contract with outside agencies for the provision of other services has been a common feature of organisational life for at least the last 200 hundred years. If public/private partnerships are examined from an objective rather than an ideological viewpoint, the key question should be: does combining two different sets of organisational skills and human capital have the potential to yield better outcomes than would have been possible with a single set of organisational skills and capital? This article reports on research conducted by the authors for the NCSL that reports on two studies: (1) a partnership between the public and private sector for the delivery of LEA services (CfBT & Lincolnshire); and (2) a public/private partnership to replace a failing school with a successful one (3Es and Surrey LEA). This preliminary research suggests that, under certain circumstances, public/private partnerships may provide a number of potential benefits for the education service.